Yeah, for a few months. It was great. The Ashland Avenue bridge over the river, by Ashland and Fullerton. It’s actually two bridges because there’s Ashland Avenue and then Webster Avenue, so it’s kind of an L bridge.

When I was in my late teens, probably, one of my friends took me down to this—it’s basically like a huge building under the bridge. The bridge used to go up and down, and they would have these huge concrete ballasts, and they needed these enormous rings for all the gears and stuff. So I would hop a little fence and then had to scramble down this little hill and then go around this fence and do some climbing, and then do some tricky climbing, and then you get into this place.

There’s like this one cavernous room, absolutely huge, and then a bunch of little rooms off of it, and then another fairly cavernous room. It was a huge space, and I started hanging out there in my late teens. It was popular with graffiti artists, ‘cause it was a totally private place for them to paint. Somebody had rigged up electricity, so there were lights in there and stuff.

Very few people ever seemed to go there. I guess me and two of my friends camped out there for a few days, maybe just for fun. I don’t even remember.

I do have a very part-time job right now, Liam tells me. Which I’ll have to go to after this. It’s like rich people, so that can be a little bit annoying. We’ve been talking about socioeconomic class, so he’s following up on that thread.

The rich people Liam’s referring to pay between four to six hundred dollars for a service—he doesn’t want to say which one, since it is his job right now, and he does enjoy it—but never think of tipping. It would be nice if it occurred to them that we’re a service and we accept tips, he explains. Some people do tip and some people don’t. I think rich people are less inclined to even think of that.

But Liam’s had a few jobs that rely even more on tipping, so he’d be quick to notice it anywhere.

Tell me about busking in Chicago, I say.

It was really day-to-day. Some days it was lots of fun and some days it was really exasperating. People were not very responsive. It was a while back, I would say 2002, 2003, somewhere in there. And then a little bit in the intervening years, but mostly that time.

Liam’s a quiet, polite man who looks younger than his age—advanced for the American punk scene he associates with. He starts by asking, Why me?

Why not you? I reply.

I guess I don’t have an answer.

But it’s been the central question of Revision Street: America since the project started. Why these people, and why now?

And the answer is pretty simple: The people I want to talk to haven’t distinguished themselves, haven’t developed platforms, don’t have constituencies, and aren’t identified leaders of social movements, business, or cultural production. They just live in Chicago, do what they need to do to get by, and still somehow a politics—and a culture—emerge.

I’ve just asked Gabi about her dog Blue, who, during the course of our conversation has become very very concerned about its own tail. There’s been barking, jumping, moving around—dog things. Things I don’t understand.

It’s all stuff Gabi’s OK spending time on—in fact, she and her friend Lisa started a non-profit business several years ago out of their homes called IssueLab. Their entire mission is to explore the kinds of things I don’t understand.

We essentially archive research done by other non-profits, she tells me. That includes all kinds of things: community ethnographies, large-scale survey reports, longitudinal studies. There’s an enormous amount of research produced by non-profits every year, but there’s no publishing system for it, no way that it gets archived. It doesn’t get cataloged by the Library of Congress, there’s no journal system. Grant makers who fund the work don’t actually hold the work or archive it.

What this means is: social service organizations and other non-profits are forced to waste financial and human resources either hunting down or re-conducting research with every new program.

Gabi came to Chicago to do something she quickly found out she didn’t want to do after all. When she returned from the arts program Atlanta in 1996 she took a secretarial job.

My big skill, for years, she tells me, Was to do the same thing over and over again at the exact same pace for 10 hours a day. I would call people and be like, Did you answer the survey? Oh, You didn’t answer it? Oh, You don’t know where the survey is? Let me fax you another copy. It was a crazy job.

It was also a frustrating one, as I recall, and Gabi and I had several six-packs worth of discussions about the nature of feminism at the time.

When I moved here, she explains, I worked for a lot of super strong women who—it was like, I couldn’t square it. Strong women who weren’t running work places that were very empowering. That’s my most diplomatic way of putting it. I had a host of jobs where I was like, Wow. I respect you as a strong woman, but I really can’t deal with the way you’re treating me. She laughs.

What’s amazing to me, I tell her, is that you stayed here.

Here’s my logic about Chicago. I’ve got it worked out. I work it out every year around mid-February.

Gabi—wicked curly hair, not tall, and not apt to be seated for very long—will tell you more about this herself, but we’ve known each other for years, ever since we worked and lived together in Atlanta during the Summer Olympic Games. She lives in Edgewater now, with an amazing rescued pit bull named Blue.

While she’s always claimed to be the sort of person who can’t get her life together, she’s also usually the only person in the room with a plan. A mutual friend once described her similarly. The two were in a class together, and would get together to talk over the concepts they were learning about. Gabi always started off by complaining how much difficulty she was having in the class but, the friend told me, “her understanding of what was going on was always so far beyond mine I had no idea what to say.”

This week I’ve been talking to Dan Terkell about growing up in Lakeview during the ‘50s and ‘60s with politically engaged parents—one of was blacklisted during the Red Scare. This caused the family some economic strain, sure. They all worked, passionately and for social justice, but this rarely pays. Were he a different person, as Dan’s been explaining, his father Studs Terkel may well have amassed vast wealth. But Studs, and Dan too, are rare types in this day and age: principled, determined, and unwilling to accept as given what has been given.

We lived in this apartment because that was what we could afford at the time. We had what I guess some folks might have considered at the time a blue collar income, even though my folks didn’t have blue collar jobs. I think it was a very healthy way to grow up. There was quite a lot of economic diversity within the area too. We were just a couple blocks off the lake—really one long block, if you’re familiar with the area between Lake Shore Drive and Broadway, just north of Belmont. Right along Lake Shore Drive and maybe half a block inland. There were a lot of families who were fairly well to do. Some kids sort of had a sense of entitlement and some a false sense of entitlement. They felt as if their shit was ice cream.

So there was a little bit of a divide, in that sense. I didn’t participate socially with them. They didn’t particularly like me, but I didn’t like them either so you might say it was a symbiotic relationship. But I had plenty of friends who were, more or less, in my own economic—I don’t like to use that word class—but economic milieu maybe. No that sounds too pretentious . . . . Economic area. I like that. Why use a more pretentious word, when you can just use a very straightforward word?